markosaric

we'll keep the script itself on MIT just to avoid any possible confusion in the future.

thanks, good point! we'll make that change just to avoid any possible confusion in the future.

For now we just changed to AGPL as a defensive move to avoid these threats. It was an unplanned move that we didn't even think about few days ago.

Next step is really to consider what we want to do in the future and if necessary add a CLA before we merge next contribution.

We never planned to do any commercial licenses (we're focused on our Cloud offering) but it seems like a valid option in case of these corporations who want to resell our product but not open source their modifications.

yep, we know now! first time involved in an open source project and perhaps naively we thought that these things don't happen!

Yeah, seems like we got on the radar of some corporations recently.

One company was promoting a proprietary, privacy first alternative to GA, we checked it out and several features/elements looked pretty much exact replicas of Plausible.

The other was that we got approached to help someone build a direct competitor based on our self-hosted code. They were upfront that they didn't want to pay us and they didn't want to contribute back to the project. They did offer us publicity to their "tens of thousands" of customers!

thank you! the easy / "obvious" choice was to close source but this was not really something we wanted to consider. we're in the privacy first space and we want to stay fully open source. AGPL should hopefully protect us better from similar commercial threats in the future

thank you! i guess you can say that we were a bit naive about this whole permissive license thing so it now feels better to have some of the protection that AGPL brings

It's crazy what we need to do these days just to surf the web!

I do this:

VPN on at all times

Firefox as the main browser

Firefox enhanced tracking protection set to Strict

Firefox containers enabled to isolate specific sites when I do want to log into them (Google...)

Everything set to be deleted (cookies, cache etc) when I close Firefox

Allowed cookies for a handful of sites I want to keep being logged into

DuckDuckGo as the main search

uBlock Origin on with default blocklists. I really love the "element picker" feature which allows me to remove annoying elements

Some thoughts:

* Habit: GA is so ingrained into the web development / marketing so it's the safe / default choice that not many will question

* Data: GA collects everything imaginable people don't need but it's still data that may sometimes be used so it's a safer choice to collect it than not to

* Awareness: many people are not aware of alternatives

* Convenience: most people don't want to self-host while most open source alternatives are focused on self-hosting

* Price: GA is free while hosted open source alternatives are not

i guess the whole web moved in that direction over the years. from keep it simple, self-host everything and reduce all dependencies, to use the cloud and third-party services as much as possible. just check any of the mainstream websites and see how many connections to external services they make.

even in the case of Plausible, we have this self-hosted (free as in beer and free as in speech) product and a hosted cloud (free as in speech) product, and vast majority of people prefer to use our hosted cloud version.

that's the one that's linked to in this post :)

thanks! we're big fans of open source so wanted as permissive licence as possible.

one of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about is how to make our project sustainable while still being as open as possible in everything we do.

a bit more details in this post "How to pay your rent with your open source project" https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-funding

depends on what study you look at, Google Analytics is installed on everywhere from 50% to 85% of all websites on the web. that may not be a big issue if Google wasn't also the largest advertising company on the web.

a blog post that helped "launch" Plausible earlier this year was "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics

thank you! what would you like improved in the UI?

:)

yeah all the privacy regulations make it difficult to do all the tracking that some businesses are used to. it's clear from testing that if they actually enforced things such as GDPR and asked for consent, majority of visitors will say no which would make their current strategy difficult. Plausible was built with all these regulations in mind so we're more a solution for businesses that want to comply with the regulations but still get some useful data.

hmm that's weird! just checked and seems to work all fine. no HN hug of death today :)

do you perhaps run any adblocker or something like that?

the link is: https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics

thanks! from our experience and testing, most website visitors say no to give tracking consent / storing cookies (up to 90+%) so this was a good balance between making something that's compliant with regulations and that's providing useful data for many use cases.

from what i know, Posthog is focused more on app/product analytics while we're focused on web analytics.

Thanks!

Depends really on the perspective you look at it from. That post is from the visitor privacy / privacy regulations perspective. If you use GA full on, you will get some advantages such as storing cookies on devices but if you either make GA "privacy friendly" (enable IP anonymization, disable user-ID, disable cookies etc) or ask visitors to consent to being tracked you will get less accurate numbers than our method.

We haven't noticed any issues with VPN usage as still you need people to use the same IP, same user agent and visit the same domain all on the same day to be counted as one with us.

yep, we've added that. instructions are here: https://docs.plausible.io/hash-based-routing/

thank you! happy to hear about that :)

thanks for including Plausible on that list!

here is my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696768

downsides are basically that in order to gain the benefits for the user privacy and compliance with regulations, you lose a bit of accuracy depending on the situation. we cannot see whether the same person returns to a site on a different day so count them as a new unique visitor.

i assume that using the referrer header to count uniques has even more downsides as i imagine the number of unique visitors with that method would be much higher than it actually is.

yes, that's a trade-off in this privacy first approach. if several people are on the same ip address, visiting the same website and having the same user agent on the same day, they look the same to us.

thanks! makes sense and i'd like to see that change too! i've added the request to our github now so we'll see what can be done: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/issues/344

there was another question about this that i responded to in this thread. no local storage is used.

We generate a daily changing identifier using the visitor’s IP address and User Agent. To anonymize these datapoints, we run them through a hash function with a rotating salt.

hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent)

This generates a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor numbers for the day. Old salts are deleted to avoid the possibility of linking visitor information from one day to the next.

See full details here: https://plausible.io/data-policy

Plausible was not built to be a clone or a full on feature by feature replacement. It is an alternative that works for many people who think GA is complicated, slow, privacy intrusive and so on.

We do try to add what we believe are 20% of GA features that 80% of GA users need without adding too much complexity.

We already do support event / goal tracking and we have metadata for goals as the next big feature on our public roadmap: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/projects/1

we have a live demo here where you can see exactly what we offer with our own website stats: https://plausible.io/plausible.io

otherwise i've published a comparison with Google Analytics: https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics

and a comparison with Matomo: https://plausible.io/vs-matomo